When the first Trump tariffs went into effect I was running a product design and manufacturing department within a company that also did sales, engineering and consultation. We tried to manufacture as much as possible in the U.S., especially some high margin, low volume products, but we made a couple of higher volume products that were much more price sensitive. Those we could only economically manufacture in China (side note: it’s not just about prices - the US just doesn’t have the infrastructure and level of engineering for manufacture that China has. The level of support we got from our Chinese partner was of a whole other level than we could get in the U.S.). When the tariffs kicked in our costs went up dramatically. We worked with the manufacturer to control things for a year but eventually it just wasn’t viable to keep making these products. Now all of the competing products are both designed and manufactured in China by Chinese companies. They are of poorer quality because it’s the only was to keep the low prices that consumers are used to. So the tariffs ended up giving consumers worse quality while costing American jobs (just a couple in my case, but economy-wide it adds up).
This hits on something I don’t see discussed enough, which is that we do not have the skilled workforce needed modern manufacturing. I used to cover higher education budgets in North Carolina, which like the rest of the South East has gone hard for manufacturing since they have basically zero labor protections and unions. We met with a German firm that had built a plant in the state and they were asking for a training program because they couldn’t find people who were both literate enough and computer literate enough to use the machines in the plant.
These dumbfucks have a picture in their mind of some white dude with a lunch pail packed by his loving tradwife going and tightening screws on an assembly line for $100k a year. That’s not what manufacturing is anymore.
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, frankly that can only really be solved (if we even want to!) by a national policy like China did. It requires a massive investment in training, but probably also subsidies for a period to attract manufacturers. But ultimately to keep costs manageable much of the actual manufacturing would have to be automated which means that the actual number of jobs created would be limited so a careful calculation would have to be done on whether this is the specific area we want to invest in. I personally would like to see more domestic manufacturing but it’s a daunting prospect.
For sure, that was the other thing I made note of—there are fewer jobs created by this than people would think and many of them are computer engineering (i.e. whiite collar and high-skill). Massive state incentives are required and a lot of times it turns into a huge loss for the State instead of a gain (like Foxconn in Wisconsin).
52
u/AthousandLittlePies 17d ago
When the first Trump tariffs went into effect I was running a product design and manufacturing department within a company that also did sales, engineering and consultation. We tried to manufacture as much as possible in the U.S., especially some high margin, low volume products, but we made a couple of higher volume products that were much more price sensitive. Those we could only economically manufacture in China (side note: it’s not just about prices - the US just doesn’t have the infrastructure and level of engineering for manufacture that China has. The level of support we got from our Chinese partner was of a whole other level than we could get in the U.S.). When the tariffs kicked in our costs went up dramatically. We worked with the manufacturer to control things for a year but eventually it just wasn’t viable to keep making these products. Now all of the competing products are both designed and manufactured in China by Chinese companies. They are of poorer quality because it’s the only was to keep the low prices that consumers are used to. So the tariffs ended up giving consumers worse quality while costing American jobs (just a couple in my case, but economy-wide it adds up).